Not sure what the hell I was thinking but I dug out an old rental tape of this movie that somehow wound up in my collection and watched it last night. Life is short, ninety minutes of one's existence may not seem like a long time but there will probably come a point in my life where I will regret having invested the time needed to let this movie play, though I may not remember the title.
The movie is an interesting study in failure, actually. There's some decent talent involved: Ray Walston out-classes everyone else in the film as "Pops", the owner of a ski resort that scurrilous Martin Mull tries to swindle away from him. Ubiquitous 80s "token black guy" actor T.K. Carter -- an effective presence in stuff like THE THING and SOUTHERN COMFORT -- puts on the Stepin Fetchit routine for a couple of musical numbers where he karaoke's along with a boom box system, aping black performers like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Little Richard ... One wonders if he was aware of the characiture he was manipulated into creating.
The oblique racist attitudes in the film continue with George Lopez doing a Rodney Dangerfield impersonation to amuse a young Latino tyke who doesn't get the joke until Lopez repeats it in Spanish. Then there is the family of vacationing Japanese tourists with their cameras who jabber excitedly to one another in their own language & snap pictures of the same things. There's also a "little person" ski patrol supervisor who's diminutive stature is the butt of several potentially cruel jokes. Perhaps one of the redeeming qualities of the film is that it's a repository of the innocently offensive pre-political correctness era. There's even a PETA baiting sequence where mice are somewhat callously handled on screen before being released en-masse to disrupt an awards banquet.
There were a couple of unintentionally funny moments like the bad guy "preppie" ski patrol members decked out in their intricately patterned fashion sweaters during a fireside discussion scene, as well as a climactic trashing of a giant wiener mobile on skis. I'm not sure they were meant to be funny but they provided the sole bright spots in the film, which to me looked like a colossal waste of talent, time, and money. The budget for the film was modest but could have been used to feed starving 3rd worlders or maybe build a school for disadvantaged American kids crowded into classrooms staffed by ineffectual teachers. Instead, someone bankrolled this movie, which quickly went out of print.
If you read the other comments posted here one theme is shared by those with a favorable opinion of the film, which is nostalgia. Most of them encountered the film as kids or as home video rental choices, which is really the only purpose I can see for the film even existing in the first place. Then again if the plug line "From the creator of POLICE ACADEMY" doesn't make you cringe with disdain there's probably nothing that could dissuade you from wasting your own time watching it. For the most part the movie is a harmless waste of time that probably won't win over any new converts and as an out-of-print video title unavailable on DVD still provides some curiosity value.
What's most curious, however, is the apparent enthusiasm that most of the cast displays while on-screen. Nobody behaves in a rational or realistic manner, everything is all gonzo, hyperactive and unreal, festooned with a sheen of late 1980s fashion sensibilities that make one wonder what the hell we were collectively thinking back then. SKI PATROL is thusly a repository of out of date ideas, fashions and values that hopefully won't ever be revisited by our culture, though it is always great to see Ray Walston owning some hotshot covered with spilled mustard.
3/10
The movie is an interesting study in failure, actually. There's some decent talent involved: Ray Walston out-classes everyone else in the film as "Pops", the owner of a ski resort that scurrilous Martin Mull tries to swindle away from him. Ubiquitous 80s "token black guy" actor T.K. Carter -- an effective presence in stuff like THE THING and SOUTHERN COMFORT -- puts on the Stepin Fetchit routine for a couple of musical numbers where he karaoke's along with a boom box system, aping black performers like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Little Richard ... One wonders if he was aware of the characiture he was manipulated into creating.
The oblique racist attitudes in the film continue with George Lopez doing a Rodney Dangerfield impersonation to amuse a young Latino tyke who doesn't get the joke until Lopez repeats it in Spanish. Then there is the family of vacationing Japanese tourists with their cameras who jabber excitedly to one another in their own language & snap pictures of the same things. There's also a "little person" ski patrol supervisor who's diminutive stature is the butt of several potentially cruel jokes. Perhaps one of the redeeming qualities of the film is that it's a repository of the innocently offensive pre-political correctness era. There's even a PETA baiting sequence where mice are somewhat callously handled on screen before being released en-masse to disrupt an awards banquet.
There were a couple of unintentionally funny moments like the bad guy "preppie" ski patrol members decked out in their intricately patterned fashion sweaters during a fireside discussion scene, as well as a climactic trashing of a giant wiener mobile on skis. I'm not sure they were meant to be funny but they provided the sole bright spots in the film, which to me looked like a colossal waste of talent, time, and money. The budget for the film was modest but could have been used to feed starving 3rd worlders or maybe build a school for disadvantaged American kids crowded into classrooms staffed by ineffectual teachers. Instead, someone bankrolled this movie, which quickly went out of print.
If you read the other comments posted here one theme is shared by those with a favorable opinion of the film, which is nostalgia. Most of them encountered the film as kids or as home video rental choices, which is really the only purpose I can see for the film even existing in the first place. Then again if the plug line "From the creator of POLICE ACADEMY" doesn't make you cringe with disdain there's probably nothing that could dissuade you from wasting your own time watching it. For the most part the movie is a harmless waste of time that probably won't win over any new converts and as an out-of-print video title unavailable on DVD still provides some curiosity value.
What's most curious, however, is the apparent enthusiasm that most of the cast displays while on-screen. Nobody behaves in a rational or realistic manner, everything is all gonzo, hyperactive and unreal, festooned with a sheen of late 1980s fashion sensibilities that make one wonder what the hell we were collectively thinking back then. SKI PATROL is thusly a repository of out of date ideas, fashions and values that hopefully won't ever be revisited by our culture, though it is always great to see Ray Walston owning some hotshot covered with spilled mustard.
3/10